Wash. Post's Wemple: Fox Exec's Response To Attack Ad “Raises Many Other” Questions

Written by Media Matters Staff

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Following widespread criticism of Fox & Friends' four-minute anti-Obama attack ad, Fox News executive Bill Shine stated that the video “was created by an associate producer and was not authorized at the senior executive level of the network.” But as Washington Post media writer Erik Wemple noted, Shine's statement “answers one question -- whether Fox News is standing by the video -- even as it raises many others.”

Wemple writes:

1) Are we supposed to believe that the producer was working on his own? The video itself reflects an enormous amount of splicing and searching and cutting and producing, a fact noted by one of the “Fox & Friends” co-anchors this morning. Oh, and it's about the president of the United States. Such an effort got around the suits?

There's another point related to the video's raw ambition. Would a producer really sink hours and hours of tedium into a package of this sort under the notion that it would displease his bosses? Or would he undertake such a heave only if he thought it would send them into fits of Foxical joy?

2) So the senior executive level never “authorized” the video. Does that mean they never viewed it? And what would they have done if they had engaged more thoroughly with the thing? Would they have killed it or just asked the producer to stick a couple of pro-Obama snippets in there for “balance”?

3) What's the interpretation of Fox News's claim to have addressed the matter “with the show's producers.” How do you address what gave rise to this video? Hey guys, next time let's disguise our intentions a little better

Wemple does go on to note that while Fox “has piled the depravity high in this episode,” it “did the right thing, however imperfectly. It bailed on a video that bore unfairness in its every second, and it did so in the course of a single day.”

While Shine singled out the associate producer for blame over the video, the Fox & Friends hosts effusively praised his “great job” producing the ad and the “tremendous amount of research” he put into it. The hosts also promoted the video on Twitter: